Category: finance

Enlarge / This may become the new default imagery for Spectre and Meltdown around Intel. (credit: Brian Turner / Flickr)
In its annual SEC filing, Intel has revealed that it’s facing 32 lawsuits over the Spectre and Meltdown attacks on its processor…

In its annual SEC filing, Intel has revealed that it's facing 32 lawsuits over the Spectre and Meltdown attacks on its processors. While the Spectre problem is a near-universal issue faced by modern processors, the Meltdown attack is specific to processors from Intel and Apple, along with certain ARM designs that are coming to market shortly.

Per Intel's filing, 30 of the cases are customer class-action suits from users claiming to be harmed by the flaws. While Meltdown has effective workarounds, they come with some performance cost. Workarounds for Spectre are more difficult and similarly can harm system performance.

The other two cases are securities class actions that claim that Intel made misleading public statements during the six-month period after the company was notified of the problems but before the attacks were made public.

The value of bitcoins plummeted 20 percent after almost 120,000 units of the digital currency were stolen from Bitfinex, a major Bitcoin exchange.

The Hong Kong-based exchange said it had discovered a security breach late Tuesday, and has suspended all transactions.

“We are investigating the breach to determine what happened, but we know that some of our users have had their Bitcoins stolen. We are undertaking a review to determine which users have been affected by the breach. While we conduct this initial investigation and secure our environment, bitfinex.com will be taken down and the maintenance page will be left up,” said the company on its website.

Making a typo in a tweet that then gets retweeted is bad enough, but imagine how dumb these hackers feel. Reuters reports that hackers broke into Bangladesh's central bank in February and started transferring large sums to accounts in the Philippines and Sri Lanka from an account held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Unfortunately for the hackers, only four of these transfers, for a total value of about $81 million, went through successfully. Not because the break-in was detected by the Bangladesh Bank or because heavily armed police kicked down the hackers' doors and arrested them all at gunpoint... but because one of the transfers had a typo. Attempting to transfer $20 million to a Sri Lankan non-governmental organization called the Shalika Foundation, the hackers instead attempted a transfer to the Shalika "Fandation." Staff at Deutsche Bank spotted this error and got in contact with the Bangladeshis to ask for clarification. The ruse was discovered and the remaining transfers were canceled.